Gray argues that it is not consciousness or language that distinguishes us from other animals. They are conscious, too, and they communicate with each other in subtle and complex ways that we are only just beginning to understand. No, the invention of writing was humanity’s real fall and the beginning of the knowledge of good and evil:‘From its humble beginnings as a means of stocktaking and tallying debts, writing gave humans the power to preserve their thoughts and experiences from time. At the same time it has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality. The development of writing has enabled them to construct philosophies in which they no longer belong in the natural world.’
That, according to Gray, was the beginning of all our woe. We invented abstractions that destroyed our peace by persuading us that we do not belong to this world. The great monotheistic religions were the original instruments of this illusion but he believes that the atheist secularism that claims to be supplanting them has fallen for the same illusion.That, according to Gray, was the beginning of all our woe. We invented abstractions that destroyed our peace by persuading us that we do not belong to this world. The great monotheistic religions were the original instruments of this illusion but he believes that the atheist secularism that claims to be supplanting them has fallen for the same illusion.
The Newberry—you may be surprised to learn—has a remarkable collection of musical scores and ephemera. Above, you’ll find three of our most lauded treasures: a handwritten aria by a nine-year-old Mozart (check out that penmanship!); a first edition of Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, considered to be the first extant opera score; and Scott Joplin’s Euphonic Sounds, which brought ragtime into the respectable mainstream.If these musical curios tickle your fancy, be sure to check out this year’s Renaissance Center NEH Summer Institute, “Music and Travel in Europe and the Americas, 1500 - 1800.” The institute, geared toward college and university professors, runs from July 15 to August 9 and includes a $3,300 stipend.
On this day in 1564, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni—the Renaissance painter and sculptor, best known for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel—passed at 88. Above is a letter to Salvestro da Montaguto, written and signed by Michelangelo in 1545.
The South still attracts the most domestic migrants of any U.S. region. Last year, it boasted six of the top eight states in terms of net domestic migration — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. Texas and Florida alone gained 250,000 net migrants. The top four losers were deep blue New York, Illinois, New Jersey and California.These trends suggest that the South will expand its dominance as the nation’s most populous region. In the 1950s, the South, the Northeast and the Midwest each had about the same number of people. Today the region is almost as populous as the Northeast and the Midwest combined.
Perhaps more importantly, these states are nurturing families, in contrast to the Great Lakes states, the Northeast and California. Texas, for example, has increased its under 10 population by over 17% over the past decade; all the former confederate states, outside of Katrina-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana, gained between 5% and 10%. On the flip side, under 10 populations declined in Illinois, Michigan, New York and California. Houston, Austin, Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta and Raleigh also saw their child populations rise by at least twice the 10% rate of the rest country over the past decade while New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago areas experienced declines.
What might dolphins be saying with all those clicks and squeaks? Each others’ names, suggests a new study of the so-called signature whistles that dolphins use to identify themselves. Whether the vocalizations should truly be considered names, and whether dolphins call to compatriots in a human-like manner, is contested among scientists, but the results reinforce the possibility. After all, to borrow the argot of animal behavior studies, people often greet friends by copying their individually distinctive vocal signatures. “They use these when they want to reunite with a specific individual,” said biologist Stephanie King of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “It’s a friendly, affiliative sign.”
The history of reading is littered with extreme emotions, especially during times of technological change. At the end of the eighteenth century, a period that witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of books, and one that has never since abated, writers began comparing reading to a “plague,” a “madness,” and a “flood” (as in the Biblical deluge). The Enlightenment German theologian, Johann Gottfried Hoche, even called reading the new “sodom.” On the other end of the spectrum, the Romantic essayist Leigh Hunt fantasized about marrying his books. The novelist Karl Immermann, author of the famed Adventures of Baron von Münchhausen, had this to say about himself as a child standing before his parents’ bookshelves: “The sheer sight of a book would set the afflicted child in a kind of quivering curiosity. The young creature lived and breathed only in print.” And we shouldn’t forget Edgar Allen Poe, whose murderous narrator of his short-story, “Berenice,” kills his cousin and then pours her teeth out on his desk – he was born in a library.Changes to the material landscape of reading elicit strong emotions. We may say, repeatedly, that the medium doesn’t matter, that only the words are important. But our reactions tell us something very different. The material nature of reading, our physical experience of those words, makes a difference in how we respond to them.
When readers were told that what they did with their kindles or tablets or screens wasn’t “reading,” they lashed out, much like the long history of readers before them. To say what reading is or is not is to impugn one of our most personal possessions.
In fact the MOOC is not a disruptive form but a fundamentally conservative one, flattening academic practice into the playing back of fixed lectures from a handful of professors recorded who-knows-how-long-ago under who-knows-which conditions. The MOOC is, in short, exactly how you’d structure higher education if you believed there was no future, if you believed you were living at the end of history and nothing was ever going to change. It’s in fact the interactive educational experience that is dynamic and radically adaptative, the interactive experience that has the power to disrupt the things both student and teacher think they know for sure.
Recognizing the continuity of evolution also makes clear the futility of selecting any particular time period for human harmony. Why would we be any more likely to feel out of sync than those who came before us? Did we really spend hundreds of thousands of years in stasis, perfectly adapted to our environments? When during the past did we attain this adaptation, and how did we know when to stop?If they had known about evolution, would our cave-dwelling forebears have felt nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal, when life was good and the trees were a comfort zone? Scavenging prey from more-formidable predators, similar to what modern hyenas do, is thought to have preceded, or at least accompanied, actual hunting in human history. Were, then, those early hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from the lion that caught it was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? In some ways, our lungs are still ill suited to breathing air. For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: After all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don’t get cancer.
I think Jacobs is right when he argues that Watchmen’s characters are simplistically sketched and have backgrounds/origin stories based on the tritest sort of Freud. What I think Jacobs is missing is that Moore did this on purpose, because Moore hates comic book heroes and wants you to share his disgust with the form. In addition to telling a story about the human condition, Moore is telling a story about the condition of the medium within which he is working: its ossification, its absurdity, and its failures.Watchmen succeeds and endures, at least in part, because it’s a deconstruction (or outright rejection) of the ideas underpinning superheroes. Rorschach, like Batman, internalized his childhood traumas and focused that pain into an unrelenting drive to make the underworld pay. In Moore’s mind, Rorschach and Batman are psychopaths who have rejected society and wish to bend the world to their will. Moore simply follows that ideal to its logical conclusion, creating a hero who acts (or maybe reacts) without restraint and adheres slavishly to a moral code only he can decipher.
And yet, in spite of the Black Keys’ indie roots, the band’s victory had hardly anything to do with indie rock. Just as they sidestepped the entrenched orthodoxy of rock radio, the Black Keys also transcended the indie caste system. They were never underground stars; in the indie rock high school cafeteria, this band was the kid with the wispy mustache and acid-washed jean jacket. And conversely, the Black Keys were outspoken in their resentment of indie politics. They depicted themselves as small-town outsiders from flyover country diametrically opposed to the privileged insider-ism of indie’s fashionable New York City hub. And, in the end, the Black Keys wound up towering over those who had ignored them. This might be a little pat, but it rings true: The Black Keys’ successful rise plays like a shadow story of how ’00s indie failed rock and roll.